DVD review: Alex Cross

IF you're a
fan of author James Patterson, you'll know the name Alex Cross.

At last count
there were 20 books featuring the gun-toting psychologist/detective, and twice
he has been brought to the big screen, portrayed by Morgan Freeman in Kiss The
Girls and Along Came A Spider.

But even if you've read all the books and seen
the other movies, there is no compelling reason to watch this reboot starring
Tyler Perry as a young Cross.

The script is bad - it's facepalm-worthy and
inadvertently hilarious in places - and someone wasn't paying attention to see
whether any of the scenes or even the entire plot made sense.

Cross and his
cop partners Monica (Nichols) and long-time buddy Tommy (Burns) are on the trail
of a psychopathic killer Picasso (Fox), who is attempting to kill off people
connected to French businessman Mercier (Reno).

Eventually, things become
personal, leading Cross and Tommy to go on a personal vendetta to stop
Picasso.

Where to start with all the things wrong with this film?

Perry as
Cross was a bad casting move - his performance ranges from "actually quite good"
to "in the wrong film", while his friendship with Burns' Tommy is about as
believable as that time Elton John married a woman.

An unrecognisable Fox -
who looks like he's been on some kind of gym-and-heroin training regime -
appears to be going for "menacing and unhinged" but comes off as "nutty and
weird", although he does get to participate in one of the few cool moments in
the film, which involves Picasso shooting a rocket from a train.

If you're
thinking "what the?" at the thought of someone firing a rocket from a train,
that actually makes sense compared to other parts of the film. Some of my
favourite baffling moments include Picasso escaping a high-rise that took
considerate effort to enter by simply running out of a room and miraculously
popping out of sewer manhole many storeys down. Or two cops breaking into their police station's evidence room via an elaborate plan that involves cutting
through iron bars and punching out another cop, when they could have just walked
in there and found an easier way to get to the evidence, because, you know,
they're cops.

Worst of all, Cross comes off as less a Sherlock Holmes/The
Mentalist kind of character and more of a lucky guesser. The water pressure is
dropping in your building? Don't call a plumber - it means there's a killer in
the building!

You could almost recommend Alex Cross as a so-bad-it's-good
movie, but not quite - it's more just bafflingly bad.